BBEdit 15.5 adds workspaces, gets a speed boost
Venerable text utility BBEdit got an update to version 15.5 on Wednesday, with the most notable feature being support for switchable workspaces.
According to Rich Siegel of Bare Bones Software, publishers of BBEdit, the inspiration for the new Workspaces feature was actually the app’s mechanic that restores settings more generally. He realized that same mechanic could be used to save and restore different states, so for instance, if you’re switching between projects or clients or types of work, you can now save your existing workspace and load a new one, with a completely different set of open windows. When you’re ready to switch back, you just load the old workspace and the current set of open windows disappears, replaced by the other workspace. It’s a simple concept that will make life easier for a lot of people who use BBEdit in many different contexts.
Another highlight of this release is a bit more subtle, but will be especially noticeable to people who do a lot of text search in BBEdit. Siegel says the BBEdit team updated a lot of its multi-file search-and-replace functionality to more modern code (keep in mind that some of that code might be as much as 40 years old!), doing a deep dive that allowed them to identify “hot spots” and optimize them to run faster. Siegel says those changes have sped up numerous BBEdit features, including not just search but processing lines and scanning HTML.
As usual, the change log is long and detailed, and includes dozens of items, including support for FTPS transfers (in addition to the existing FTP and SFTP support), more prominent highlighting of parentheticals (I’ve found this very helpful in my python scripts), the ability to strip diacriticals from text, a Window menu that supports the standard macOS facilities for moving and resizing, improvements to Git support, and previewing of delimited text files (despite the fact that BBEdit is still not a spreadsheet).
As usual, BBEdit is free to download—and has an awful lot of functionality for no cost. Additional features are unlocked with purchase direct from Bare Bones, which is $60 (discounts for previous version owners available), or via a Mac App Store subscription for $5/month or $50/year.